Nielsen has launched a new rating that will try to capture the social conversation around television shows started on Twitter.

The Twitter TV Ratings will measure the number of people tweeting about TV programs as well as how many Twitter users are viewing those messages.

Nielsen says an analysis of the Twitter TV rating found the audience of users viewing tweets about a TV show is about 50 times larger than the authors firing off tweets.

The research firm has also seen a a huge jump in tweets about live television. According to SocialGuide, the platform that will manage the Twitter rating, 263 million tweets were composed by 19 million people in the U.S. during the second quarter of this year, a 24% jump from last year.

"As the experience of TV viewing continues to evolve, our TV partners have consistently asked for one common benchmark from which to measure the engagement of their programming," says Chloe Sladden, Twitter's vice president of media, when the rating was announced in December. "This new metric is intended to answer that request, and to act as a complement and companion to the Nielsen TV rating."

Examples of Twitter's influence abound. The recent finale of Breaking Bad generated a record 1.24 million tweets. The conversation peaked at 22,373 tweets per minute according to analytics firm SocialGuide. People used the hashtag "GoodbyeBreakingBad" nearly 500,000 times. During this year's Super Bowl, sports fans generated 24 million tweets about the competition and nearly half of the game's nationally televised commercials contained hashtags that encouraged viewers to tweet.

"It's exciting that investments are being made to build 360 degree engagement—and drive passion from viewers—around programming," says Steve Hasker, Nielsen's president of global product leadership, in a statement. "This holistic measure of how Twitter activity influences TV engagement will bring clarity to the value of those efforts."

The rating arrives as Twitter gets ready to go public. Last week, the company revealed the first details of its finances as part of its initial public offering. Twitter reported revenue of $254 million during the first half of 2013, more than double what they made in the first six months of last year.

But there are concerns about Twitter's user growth, which has shown signs of slowing down. The company boasts 218 million monthly active users, and saw its user base grow 44%. However, that was less than the 78% increase in users reported a year earlier.